"Why do they keep saying Stuart Pearce is going to be in the England dugout?" a friend's seven-year-old son asked me accusingly before England's friendly with Holland. "It isn't a dugout. What is it dug out from?" The boy, it should be noted, has such a quest for enlightenment that a few months ago he asked his mother: "Why do I keep asking why?"

However, as someone who often wonders why a patch of ground where frustrated and angry men shout and wave their arms about is referred to in football as "the technical area" (in real life it is usually called "a cab rank"), I could understand the boy's perplexity. Nowadays the place in which managers sit pensively sipping mineral water like ferry passengers trying to stave off seasickness is above ground and made of Perspex. Instead of being called "the manager's dugout" the structure should really be renamed "the manager's conservatory", reflecting football's upwardly mobile image.

The old-fashioned dugout was quite a different matter. A no-frills brick structure that squatted robustly in the mud like a second world war coastal lookout post, the dugout gave off the whiff of marsh gas and the promise of trench foot. Quite why it was built that way is anybody's guess – perhaps in an era when outdoor toilets were still the norm it was simply designed to remind the gaffer of where he did his best thinking. From this low-level vantage point the manager had his eyes on the same level as the players' ankles. This gave him limited perspective on what was happening on the pitch, but he certainly knew if any of his team had not tied his bootlaces properly, which for many old-school bosses was far more important.

In those far-gone days the dugout did not need to accommodate many people – only three in fact: manager, substitute and trainer. The latter was charged with providing all on-the-field healthcare. The trainer was armed with a bucket and sponge. He carried the same equipment as a window cleaner and had just about as much medical knowledge. The trainer's prescription for just about every ailment from a calf strain to concussion was to douse the injured area in cold, murky water. The results were often gruesomely comic. The great Manchester United goalkeeper Alex Stepney – no stranger to injury, having once dislocated his jaw shouting at Martin Buchan – told me that during a derby against City in the early 70s John Aston broke his leg. "It happened a few minutes before half-time," he said. "When he came off he said to our trainer, Jack Crompton: 'There's something the matter. My leg's all numb.' Jack told him to stamp up and down a few times to get the circulation going. When he did you could hear the broken ends of the bone jarring together."

The trainer was – mercifully perhaps – replaced by a physio and since then what are usually referred to as "backroom staff" have proliferated so rapidly I suspect that the backroom has had to have a sun lounge added on to it to accommodate them all.

My father spent his working life in the steel industry and would often remark that when he started out there were three people producing something for every one person administrating it, and by the time he finished the ratio had been reversed. Something similar has happened in sport.

This is nowhere truer than in international rugby where the coaching staff and their laptops are now so numerous the touchline can no longer accommodate them and they are forced to sit in a giant glass box through which we can observe their reactions to events – the Scotland coach, Andy Robinson, for example, sitting over in one corner glowering like Fungus the Bogeyman, while staff at the nearby hospitality suites do their level best to stop his proximity from curdling the cream.

Robinson favours a pinstripe suit, the England caretaker Stuart Lancaster a tracksuit, but it is fair to say that, fashion-wise, none of the current crop can match the recently departed French coach Marc Lièvremont and his staff who during one memorable Six Nations chose to kit themselves out in matching powder blue polo necks, of a sort not seen since the Young Generation were cavorting about to Bright Elusive Butterfly of Love on the Val Doonican Show. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect Crimplene bell-bottoms may also have been part of the uniform.

That great innovator Sir Clive Woodward is surely the man responsible for this situation. After all, the British and Irish Lions he took to New Zealand in 2005 were the first sports touring party in history to outnumber the population of the country it was visiting. Once he arrived in New Zealand Woodward chose to focus on rugby tactics so complex that Gavin Henson has been dizzy ever since, when perhaps a simpler and more effective plan might have been to order his vast agglomeration of technical support staff to eat every bit of food on the islands, forcing the All Blacks to concede victory, or watch their loved ones starve.

Perhaps the Football Association and whoever is in the England dugout by then might try that in Poland and Ukraine. On the evidence so far it may be the team's best hope.